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As a greeting, the word was used by Cheech Marin in his 1987 film Born in East L.A. in the phrase Órale vato, ¡wassápenin! meaning All right man!, what's happening? a popular phrase used by Mexican Americans who have taken the gitano word vato from northern Mexico slang to mean man.
According to Rick Bayless, the chef and owner of Frontera Grill, this is because Mexican-Americans in Chicago do not encounter a substantial Chicano community that tells them how to cook food in the United States, so the immigrants use the same frame of reference that they had in Mexico.
The most widely known and accepted story is that the La Raza Unida Party was established on January 17, 1970 at a meeting of 300 Mexican-Americans in Crystal City, Texas by José Ángel Gutiérrez and Mario Compean, who had also helped in the foundation of the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in 1967.
She graduated from San Bernardino High School in 1956 and studied journalism at San Jose State University as one of the first Mexican-Americans to attend college, but did not finish her degree.
On the legal front, MALDEF made U.S. civil rights history during Martínez's tenure as general counsel and president when she directed a program that helped secure an extension of the Voting Rights Act to include Mexican Americans among the groups it protected, overcoming skepticism from both traditional, white conservative groups as well as the NAACP (whose director, Clarence Mitchell, maintained that expanding the Voting Rights Act to include other groups could weaken its protection of blacks).